London Underground has its busiest day ever

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London Underground experienced its busiest day ever last month when 4,735,000 people used the Tube.

Friday, October 9 is now the busiest day in Transport for London’s (TfL) 152-year-old history. Its passenger count of nearly 5 million broke the previous record of 4,734,000, achieved on November 28 last year, also a Friday.

The last week of October was also record-breaking, with the network carrying 28.6m people, a shade more than the 28.3m that used the network during a single week in December last year.

TfL’s most recent figures, from April 2014 to April this year, show that the network’s busiest station is Oxford Circus. A total of 98.5 million people used the central London hub during that period, followed by King’s Cross (91.9 million) and Waterloo (91.5 million).

However, when judged on weekday averages, Waterloo becomes the busiest, with 144,764 entries and 145,655 exits, followed by King’s Cross (144,672 and 135,842) and Oxford Circus (143,996 and 157,520).

During the last financial year 1.30 billion journeys were made on the Tube, up from 1.26 the year before.

To put London's Tube network into perspective, it is not even in the top 10 busiest underground networks in the world. In first place is Beijing Subway, with 3.4billion journeys a year, followed by Tokyo Subway (3.2billion) and the Shanghai Metro (2.8billion).

London is pipped into tenth place by the Paris Metro which has 1.5billion journeys a year.